PortalPlayer on Its Customer Base and Customer Strategy (PLAY 4Q04 Conf Call Quotes)

Fabless semiconductor firm PortalPlay (ticker: PLAY) provides the chip that powers Apple's iPods. CEO Gary Johnson discussed the company's latest platform, its effort to broaden its customer base (beyond Apple) and its customer strategy in a January 20 conference call. Excerpts:

our fourth-generation platform, the Photo Edition, has recently resulted in innovative new products from Apple Computer, Gateway, Reigncom -- also known as iRiver -- Samsung and Tatung. In addition, during 2004, our Audio Edition platform was used in products by iGo, one of the largest MP3 suppliers in China; Iowa/Stoney (ph), Apple Computer, Bang and Olufsen, BenQ, Median -- a leading German brand -- Mitac, Olympus, Philips, RCA, Rio, Rock Digital -- which is selling in Macy's and CompUSA -- Roland, Samsung, and Virgin Electronics...

Our customer strategy is to focus our efforts on winning designs on most companies that we believe are brand leaders worldwide, those that have the marketing clout and shelf space to enable their products to potentially ramp to significant volumes… In 2005, we intend to continue our focus on product development efforts on the feature-rich segments of the personal media player market… The way that we generally look at this industry, as you said, it is a sub-segment of the consumer electronics space. So we have seen dramatic volume growth and continued improvements in integration and performance feature-add.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)